I remember standing outside the dog track on a country road wearing my mom’s dress, the flash of the light bouncing off my pearly ghost skin. I don’t think someone like me was in the Kerry newspaper’s before… I was scared.
The first time I was on the radio in Ireland, they said ‘Think of all the people you are confusing…don’t you think it’s selfish?’ – I remember pacing around my small room in Cork on the phone. I was fighting to explain why I existed…I was scared.
I worked in a video game shop in Cork when I started to wear makeup. I was writing a book about being non-binary and the day I got my first copy I was told about a complaint about me, a man came in and said that I was dressed in ‘circus makeup’ and that I was a man. He sent the complaint all the way to head office and I had to be investigated…I was scared.
I went home for Chirstmas a few years ago and a drunk man and his friends started to shout at me saying I was gay. All my childhood friends were with me, and they watched as I fought back. The man laughed, and I was angry. They all stood there and afterwards, one of my childhood friends said ‘That was an overreaction, you should calm down’ . It was like I was always fighting…and I was tired of fighting.
I remember one of my oldest friends ignoring me in Tesco. I was with my mom and sister. He said ‘I don’t want to be associated with someone like you’ and that was the last time we ever spoke.
I remember reading the comments on the internet when my newspaper articles went online. Hundreds of comments that made me break down in tears. I deactived my instagram and stopped putting myself out there. It was too much, and I couldn’t handle the hate. I was so sick of fighting.
My universal credit coach recently told me that they keep changing my pronouns from they/them to he/him on the internal system, and that he’s trying his best and has left a note for them to stop doing that.
I remember sitting with my old best friend at a pub and how he told me that ‘what I’m doing is hurtful and wrong’. The amount of friends who I have lost along the way has been crazy. It goes to show ya- you never know someone until they spit at you. Or something like that!
Sometimes I wish I wasn’t like this and that I was just a boy. How easy life wouldv’e been for me.
And now, trans people are having to fight yet again. People will kill themselves…and if you’re not scared and angry…you’re part of the problem.
I remember the journalist for the Kerry neswpaper asking me ‘Do you think it’s getting easier for you to be who you are?’, that was 5 years ago now. I’m not sure what I said at the time…but now I think about it and I’m not happy with the truthful answer..
I wanted to share little real life expereinces of what it’s like, and how hard the every day moments can be. I want to send all my love to people everywhere who have to fight!
But I don’t want to lie…I’m really scared.
THE QUEER PRAYER BOOK 